SUMMARY
In its intrastate armed conflict against the Sinhala dominated Sri Lankan government the LTTE has made use not only of armed confrontations with the Sri Lankan Army (SLA), but has also conducted numerous attacks on unarmed civilians of Tamil, Muslim and primarily Sinhala ethnicity.
Even though LTTE very rarely accepts official and public responsibility for attacks on civilians many such attacks are deemed to have been carried out by the organization. One explanation for these violent tactics can perhaps be found in the LTTE perception that the East has been deliberately colonized by Sinhalese civilians being directed to do so by the government. Attacks against Muslim and Sinhalese civilians can then be seen as a part of a wider strategy of creating a Tamil homeland in the north and east, dominated by the Tamil ethnic group. It has also been suggested that LTTE, in its earlier stages of evolvement, carried out attacks on Sinhalese and Muslim civilians to provoke retaliation by government forces; in effect swelling the numbers of disgruntled Tamil youth wanting to join the organization's ranks. LTTE also conducts attacks on civilians deemed to be collaborating with the government, or other civilians that oppose the Tigers grip on the Tamil community.
The tactics used when attacking civilians vary greatly, from shootings and knife/machete attacks to car bombings, mine attacks on public transports and suicide attacks, and are carried out both in times of relative calm and in times of full-scale combat with the SLA.
It is hard to point to an established pattern of targeting, but the majority of victims have been farmers and villagers from rural areas of Sri Lanka, although attacks have also occurred in urban areas such as the capital Colombo. The bulk of victims are killed in the disputed and ethnically mixed areas of the East, Northeast and North-Central provinces. Particularly violent areas have been Trincomalee, Batticaloa, and Amparai. The years following in 2001 (2002-2005) saw a noticeable downward trend in killings, until the conflict reignited to full-scale war in 2006. In the first five months of 2009, heavy fighting took place between the government army and LTTE. At the same time, LTTE also perpetrated one-sided violence against civilians. There were several reports claiming that LTTE fired at civilians who tried to leave LTTE-controlled territory in the Mullaitivu district, killing a large number of civilians. Since the war was declared to be over on 19 May 2009, there have been no reports of renewed LTTE one-sided violence against civilians.
LTTE first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1989, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in February that year following attacks against Sinhala villagers in the northeast Sri Lanka.
